BREAKING NEWS FROM 1969: “Are Democrats and Republicans talking about the same country?”, asks a Washington Post astonished that anyone wouldn’t be enjoying the twilight of the era of Hopenchange.
I found this story much more interesting when it first ran 45 years ago. In December of 1969, Time magazine nominated “The Middle Americans” as their “Man and Woman of the Year:”
The American dream that they were living was no longer the dream as advertised. They feared that they were beginning to lose their grip on the country. Others seemed to be taking over—the liberals, the radicals, the defiant young, a communications industry that they often believed was lying to them*. The Saturday Evening Post folded, but the older world of Norman Rockwell icons was long gone anyway. No one celebrated them: intellectuals dismissed their lore as banality. Pornography, dissent and drugs seemed to wash over them in waves, bearing some of their children away.
* * * * * * *
The gaps between Middle America and the vanguard of fashion are deep. The daughters of Middle America learn baton twirling, not Hermann Hesse. Middle Americans line up in the cold each Christmas season at Manhattan’s Radio City Music Hall; the Rockettes, not Oh! Calcutta! are their entertainment. While the rest of the nation’s youth has been watching Dustin Hoffman in Midnight Cowboy, Middle American teen-agers have been taking in John Wayne for the second or third time in The Green Berets. Middle Americans have been largely responsible for more than 10,000 Christmas cards sent to General Creighton Abrams in Saigon. They sing the national anthem at football games—and mean it.
The culture no longer seems to supply many heroes, but Middle Americans admire men like Neil Armstrong and to some extent, Spiro Agnew. California Governor Ronald Reagan and San Francisco State College President S.I. Hayakawa have won approval for their hard line on dissent. Before his death last year, Dwight Eisenhower was listed as the most admired man in the nation—and Middle America cast much of the vote. In death, John Kennedy is also a hero. Ironically, Robert Kennedy had the allegiance of much of Middle America along with his constituency of blacks and the young. Whatever their politics, both Kennedys had an idealism about America, a pride about it to which Middle Americans responded because they shared it.
To place the above “Gorillas in the Mist”-style paragraphs in perspective, Henry Luce, who founded Time magazine in 1923 precisely to appeal to Americans like himself — conservative center-right Americans whom the following decade would see through the New Deal, FDR, and collectivism — had been dead for less than three years when the above copy was written. And yet the gulf between the core subscribers whom Luce courted from the 1920s until he abdicated control over his publishing empire shortly before his death and Luce’s successors was already that large.
And it was never be bridged again by Time, or indeed much of the MSM. As James Lileks wrote a decade ago, when the Washington Post was still astonished that an insufficient number of Americans were swayed by the overwhelming charisma and raw animal sex appeal that is John Kerry, “once upon a time the major media at least pretended that the heart & soul of the country was a porch in Kansas with an American flag. Now it’s the outlands, the Strange Beyond. They vote for Bush, they believe in God, they’d have to drive 2 hours for decent Thai. Who are these people?”
* Gee, where would they get that idea?